I can't really remember when I started reading Nintendo Power, but I know I was in elementary school and I think that if I ever brought one in or mentioned Nintendo, my friend would tell me Nintendo was for babies and that Xbox was where it's at (this was during the GameCube era). Some of the earliest issues I had, that I can remember aren't really that old. I remember when Shadow the Hedgehog's cover issue on his hog, but I think I'd already been buying them for a while prior to that, here and there.

I hate Shadow!

I can't remember when I actually started subscribing, but at some point, I'd finally stopped just looking at the pictures (oh, elementary school) and began actually reading the articles, and I think I would read them essentially cover to cover for a while. I used to love the Pulse section and found the editors answers to reader mail hilarious- my brother Jake and I used to call it the funny pages. I loved the Power Profiles when they were introduced and the even newer polls feature, where I still vote in from time to time. I also remember visiting their old website where you could browse their most recent issues in digital form including a cool page turn animation that would have the corner of the page already start to lift when you moved your mouse near it. Their current site features similar functionality without the fancy animations. For some reason, I used to play with that all of the time! By far my favorite thing, though, was how every issue used to come with a poster! This is where the majority of my posters came from and what started my love for video game posters (and sparked me hunting down posters in stores and other magazines)! Unfortunately, probably around the time Nintendo handed the magazine over to Future publishing (I'm not sure on this, though) Nintendo Power stopped their monthly posters! Every once in a blue moon you might get one, but this decreased the chances even more that you'd get one you'd like (especially since I used to be particularly picky). Still, they began selling these cool non-canon issues including poster only magazines at newsstands and stores and I managed to pick up at least one! It was filled to the brim with AWESOME posters, many of which I still plan to hang up (whenever I get around to rehanging posters)! Other than poster specific magazines, they have made special holiday guides, and dedicated character guides for Mario and Link, which I wish I would've (and still might try to) bought!

What my poster setup looked like years ago...

Now, I have stacks and stacks of these things. Likely not as much as most people lamenting the magazines cancellation (including IGN's awesome article with a lot of employees thoughts on the end of NP) but quite a few hefty shoe boxes full! Here are some of my favorite NP covers (from the issues I've owned);

(I should note that they eventually started having cool subscriber exclusive cover art where they just used the background image and cleaned off all of the little newsstand style attention grabbers pointing to certain articles within littering the page, and they looked really sleek!)

I love sprites and I believe this one came with stickers!

I love this Wii game!

Still haven't played this but that's some great TMNT art!

Beautiful european LoZ:OoT3D box art!

I'm a sucker for classic Sonic! Flickr Credit: hattrick4nintendo

Star Fox 64 3D has some of the best promo art of any game...

This game has one of my favorite box arts of all time.

The concept art for Skyward Sword is beautiful (bad picture quality)!

Classic.

Perhaps my most memorable cover is the Nintendo WiFi connection ones, back when Nintendo DS was receiving online-enabled games, starting with games like Mario Kart DS (probably the best DS game of all time) and Animal Crossing: Wild World. This was probably when I was reading the majority of the issue's contents, and I remember being so excited for these games and online! I'd always wanted my GameCube games to be online like my brother's PC games, so the fact that I was finally getting that was huge!

One of my most memorable covers... I believe there was one with Mario Kart racers racing on the world, too!yy

Sadly, I've stopped reading them in recent years. I didn't stop my subscription (although I've thought about it), but because IGN covers the news so quickly (and even when there's an NP exclusive, it hits the web soon after newsstands) I'm hardly ever interested in reading them or even finding time to, anymore. It doesn't help that now that I'm a PS3 gamer as well as Wii (and interested in gaming news spanning all consoles, including Xbox, PS Vita, and OUYA) when this magazine obviously ignores anything non-Nintendo. I think that for these last few issues, though, I will read again (and maybe continue my attempts at getting a letter into the Pulse section!!).

As you can see in this tweet from months ago, I've been trying to get back into reading them for a while, it's just hard to find the time. I completely failed to meet that goal. In fact, until it was announced that NP was being cancelled, I hadn't even realized that my subscription must have run out in June, because I haven't received the July or August issues this summer! And while it may be far too little, too late, I'm going to make an effort to resubscribe and enjoy these last few issues whilst I can.